


liability

by pinkgrapefruit



Category: RuPaul's Drag Race RPF
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Cute little girls, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Disordered Eating, Emotional Hurt, F/F, F/M, Flower metaphors, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, References to Drugs, Substance Abuse, Toxic Relationships, be aware of what triggers you and go forth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-05
Updated: 2020-04-05
Packaged: 2021-03-01 05:40:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23499910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinkgrapefruit/pseuds/pinkgrapefruit
Summary: She’s twenty, barely an adult yet, heart shattered by the only man she’s ever let in. It’s cold and it’s raining and the sound of thunder outside the cage of the taxi makes her shiver, even though the tears running down her cheeks are wetter than the storm. They roll down like tidal waves crashing against the shore of her nose - her cupid’s bow a graveyard of sailors lips - full of berry lipstick and regret, blooming like marigolds down the heart line of her palm.
Relationships: Jan Sport/Jackie Cox
Comments: 47
Kudos: 62





	liability

**Author's Note:**

> hey! i've been working on this for a while and I'm super proud of it. It's got some cute fluff and some harder moments. if you're familiar with past works of mine - it's nothing worse than summertime sadness but please do read the tags before diving in - it's a little dark. 
> 
> Other than that, I think parts of it are some of my best work and I would love to hear what you think.
> 
> Thanks to Frey for betaing and Jaz and Moll for being fantastic emotional support. 
> 
> Love you all!
> 
> (ps, there's a flower dictionary at the end)

_ Baby really hurt me _

_ Crying in the taxi _

_ He don't wanna know me _

She’s twenty, barely an adult yet, heart shattered by the only man she’s ever let in. It’s cold and it’s raining and the sound of thunder outside the cage of the taxi makes her shiver, even though the tears running down her cheeks are wetter than the storm. They roll down like tidal waves crashing against the shore of her nose - her cupid’s bow a graveyard of sailors lips - full of berry lipstick and regret, blooming like marigolds down the heart line of her palm.

She leans her head back on the headrest, beige leather against blonde hair - brown in the places where she’d forgotten to touch up her roots. Her reflection scares her. It’s unkempt, unkept, the smile she gives herself is faker than a reality TV fight, and she wonders what she is missing. What is the secret she is yet to find. What is the answer to the question on the tip of her tongue.

She bites it til her mouth is filled with the metallic taste of blood, but she doesn’t find the answer. The red on her teeth could pass for lipstick, but her perfume smells like Cypress, and that’s not fooling anybody. 

There are not enough boxes in her mind to hold the weight of her emotions. 

She wants to go mad, but any other lips on hers would feel like a sin. She makes the driver pull over on a random side street she doesn’t recognise because she is feeling reckless, and empties the contents of her stomach into a plant pot that did nothing to offend her, but she needed somewhere to bury her emotions and that seemed as good a place as any. The rain has soaked her cheap minidress and the lilac barely hides a thing now - nipples pert in the cold and visible through the thin fabric. She tugs her bomber jacket further around herself and tries to orient herself based on the way the wormwood grows through the street cracks. A flickering subway sign catches her eye, but the rain is sideways and neon lines only make her think of Broadway, which is another regret to add to the evening's growing pile. 

She finds a barely sheltered alleyway and a loose cigarette at the bottom of her purse - lets it smoke her out - force all her demons in through the nose and out through the mouth, in through the nose and out through the mouth.

She finds two twenty dollar bills and a tube of cherry carmex at the bottom of the bag, along with a receipt for too expensive martini and a wrist band from a club she doesn’t remember. 

She burns the paper with her lighter and watches the flames dance in the air, fragile as they fall to the ground. 

_ Says he made the big mistake of dancing in my storm _

_ Says it was poison _

She was only eighteen - a child, living off McDonald's and cheap ramen in a city that never slept. She worked two jobs and took classes at community college and she should have never moved out of that small town in New Jersey. But it was sheltering her, suffocating her, and in New York City - she finally felt free.

And then she met a man who taught her what cloud nine felt like - who held her hand and let her touch the sky and feel the wind blow through her hair. And he seemed perfect. And she was young and naive with the eyes that could bring an army to surrender and cheeks that would make a cherub jealous, and she didn't yet know that when you feel so very high - there will be a comedown. There is always a comedown.

But she learnt. She learnt about the fall from grace as he tried hard to cling on to the heights - left scratch marks down her back from clawing his way out of the pits of hell. How all demons used to be angels, and how most would never be one again. She learnt Lucifer and Lillian and Adam’s betrayal. And she let him use her as a stepping stone even though he kept calling her a tripwire. 

He'd take body shots out of her belly button and spit them into her face, but then he'd pepper her in kisses and let his tongue do all the apologising he would never do - confused affection with sincerity, and love with something that it was not. 

But she just thought that love was loyalty. And she didn't know that apologising, but not changing is just as much manipulation as it is blackmail. 

He was big and strong and held her on his shoulders as they danced around the living room - let her stand on his feet and slow dance to classical jazz - the kind you only find on vinyl. He had sandy blonde hair that made you just yearn for the ocean, and his eyes were green like the trees in the summertime - flowers in full bloom. He would sing Billie Holiday as he washed her hair in the bath, and tell her she was beautiful just sitting on the couch. And he made pancakes like nobody else.

And she just thought she was in love. And nothing else would matter. 

And she was wrong. But aren't we all?

_ So I guess I'll go home _

_ Into the arms of the girl that I love _

_ The only love I haven't screwed up _

She tilts her head to the side as she looks at herself in the full body mirror she keeps next to her bed. Her teeth worry her bottom lip just a little bit as she runs smooth palms over the soft skin. Her thighs are pale and supple, and her skin bounces back when she pulls at it. She can run a finger over the stretch marks on her ass - the ones she got when puberty finally graced her with the curves she'd always prayed for, but she was so embarrassed, she hid them for a whole summer, until she could finally wear a bikini and not feel self-conscious. 

She firmly believes that body confidence is a state of mind, and she places a palm on each hip, pulling them back until her tummy is taut before letting it fall back to its natural shape - admiring every curve and line and freckle - every patch of hair.

She's proud of how she looks. 

She tugs a little at the bags under her eyes, makes a stupid face at herself in the mirror just for the hell of it. In the muted lights of the bedroom her eyes are the colour of bluebells - the kind that blooms year after year, never changed by the weather or the ground. She wishes for that kind of consistency in her life - for her passions to bloom like bluebells through the cracks in her facade. When she smiles at herself - it's toothy, youthful, and it makes her nose scrunch in reaction. 

She misses how she used to run through the woods that backed onto her yard. How she would pick buttercups in spring and braid them through her hair. She would hold one up against the front of her neck and ask - like it was the most important, most exciting thing in the world - if it was glowing. And the honey yellow would light up her veins in a warm flush, and she would feel just a little bit magical. She longs for that notalgia, that hopefulness, that ignorance.

She trails her middle finger over the grey lace of her favourite bralette - feels the texture change under her finger. 

She pushes another finger under the waistband of her underwear and shivers at the snap it makes when pulled back and let go. 

Fluttering her eyes closed, she remembers what it felt like to feel love. And then she practices it.

_ She's so hard to please _

_ But she's a forest fire _

She lets her head fall in love with Nicky, but keeps her heart under lock and key. It’s chained away between her ribs, above her diaphragm in a place where even she can’t really find it anymore - protected by yellow roses and rainflowers. Atonement for what she has done wrong. What she is going to do wrong.

Nicky seems like the answer. God, what Jan wouldn't do for an answer.

She falls for Nicky like you fall into addiction - without realising at first, and then with extreme clarity of everything ill in this world. She carries it on her back until her spine feels close to breaking, and only then does she let the relationship grow it’s own legs and walk away from her. 

Sometimes she struggles to discern the bruises on her mind from the fingerprints on her wrists. The flickering of the flames of lust that smoulders in her veins from the fire that will one day burn down the village. Nicky tends towards destruction and Jan has always been good at following orders, so she destroys herself just to fit the trend. 

Days are spent fucking until the sheets burn her lower back and her knees are splodged in violet and crimson. Nights are spent in dingy bars with names that make you think of hipster songs - playlists that probably have too long names about falling in love and getting your heart broken ,or wanting to drown just to feel your lungs work again. She’s not mad at them, she understands. 

Nicky is never bad to her. She is wrong for her - they fit like a badly made jigsaw, some pieces are forced together, while some have cavernous gaps that look so enticing to just step into. They are wrong for each other. In every place Jan is soft, Nicky is hard bone, she is steel corsetry and black dahlias, and possesses the uncanny ability to have Jan at her knees just by licking her lips with a look in her eye.

She shadows her eyes to keep the bruises looking like artistry.

At a time when Jan needs warmth and a guiding hand - Nicky is there to set her on a different path. One with an iron door and a floor of hot coals. 

Jan dances for her one too many times, the floor set ablaze. 

Nicky enjoys it just a little too much.

_ I do my best to meet her demands _

_ Play at romance, we slow dance _

Jan runs away from Nicky like you run away from a house on fire. You grab what you need and you go. Jan grabbed the Vodka and she never looked back. 

She realises, somewhere between the rum and cokes and the line of cocaine, that she's got an addictive personality. She gives her everything to something, like it's the only thing that will keep her breathing and, if she is lucky (which she so rarely is these days), sometimes a survival mechanism will kick in and she will snap out of it. But most of the time - she is all or nothing. 

She spills Kahlua on her hardwood floor and tequila in the shower - switches water for wine like an amateur Jesus. She smokes weed out of her grandmother's antique china and snorts one very precise line of cocaine before realising that that sort of high is not for her. She has never known an euphoria - it seems stupid to learn from a drug.

She reads books while slowing down time and wakes up feeling the need to read them again - just because. Orders whole pizzas and eats them on her own, but still loses weight and it's not that she wants this - it just sort of happens. 

She works to live, but she doesn't really live for what she's doing. It happens, and she shrugs and she lights a cigarette and continues on her way - spending more money than she has in New York City dive bars and shitty strip clubs that ask her for more than she can give, but still take it anyway.

She falls in love with the idea of love in a way that is dangerous, but there is no one there to stop her, and no one has been stopping her this whole time. She wants someone to love her unconditionally, but the condition she is in would require more bubble wrap than you can buy and a "fragile" sticker greater than the area of Central Park.

By the time she turns twenty-one she's already drunk her way through New York City and no one's batted an eyelid at the crying girl in the corner with the sharp collar bone and the stick and poke sunshine.

She finds herself lonely more than she is alone, and she misses the blonde man who told her she was everything, while acting like she was nothing, and the french girl who reminded her what life tasted like, while biting her tongue just to taste it herself. 

She fails her Shakespearean literature class, but she's okay with that. He always loved a good tragedy, and in a way, she feels like she's making him proud.

_ In the living room, but all that a stranger would see _

_ Is one girl swaying alone _

_ Stroking her cheek _

The smell of rust on the fire escape reminds her of the taste of blood. She smokes a cigarette with one hand, lights a second with the other, repeats the cycle until her lungs are burning like a swimmer who needs to come up for air, but if she comes up for air she’ll have to face what she’s done, and she doesn’t know if her fragile heart can handle the road of broken glass she’s paved herself.

She tiptoes around her apartment, every picture frame is an eggshell waiting to shatter, and she is shattered. She’s exhausted. Her fatigue echos through the cavern of her lower abdomen, twisting her stomach, making her sick. She doesn’t eat more than an almond anyway, she’s surviving on white bread and Cheetos from the bodega down the street. She can’t be a danger if she can’t stand too fast for fear of fainting - if her blood doesn't run through her body on fire anymore, but like a lazy river.

She has to stub out her cigarettes when her fingers turn blue - her circulation not what it used to be before she started supplementing love with drinks, and drinks with long days in a dark room and second-hand smoke from her own habits. 

The bags under her eyes are full of blue and green, swirling around like an ocean under the flat grey of her eyes. She remembers that they used to be blue, but she can't picture she shade. the colour seems to be bleeding out of her and she can't stop it. Her nails are lilac, and her hair is an ash brown, and she knows the blush in her cheeks was once vibrant. If she misses it, she might accept she needs help. Survival tells her she can't. She chooses not to miss it.

Fungi have started to grow in the hollows of her collarbone and the grouting of the kitchen. It spreads like black mould and gives her a cold for weeks, although it does nothing for her defence when she spends the early hour of the morning burning time on her fire escape. 

The downstairs neighbours' yellow roses taunt her through the grating and she drops her cigarette butts into the plant pots - it makes her smile, makes her focus long enough to keep her hands from shaking as she drops them weakly and hopes the wind won’t ruin this for her. The wind keeps changing and it scares her to imagine she could be stuck like this.

_ They say, "You're a little much for me _

_ You're a liability _

_ You're a little much for me" _

Jan learns to loathe cold bedsheets and the smell of loneliness that clings in dark places - finds herself with company more often than not, because they chase away the nightmares. The kind of company that slinks out the fire escape in the middle of the night, because that many men and women on rotation will not be looked upon favourably by the old woman next door. 

She lets them have their way with her, but won't let them stay long for fear of an attachment forming that's not any more than a bruise on the fragile skin of her chest.

Solitude is a learned habit, but so is remembering to brush your teeth and watering the geraniums in your soul. A lone soldier, but Jan does not think she is brave.

She watches the sun come up from her living room floor, a woman asleep in her bed. She cannot share anymore - there is something sacred about the feeling of someone else's legs entwined with your own and she doesn't see it fit to share that.

She hears her neighbour laugh with her husband as she is filled with another man, and she feels a pang of disgust at herself. When he is done she kicks him out and then lays alone in her bed.

She wonders if it is a primal thing - the urge to keep what is hers, but take what is not. If it is something ingrained within her, that she cannot trust someone for more than a fuck and a moment of surrender. 

She wonders if she should even surrender at all. 

Men have always let her down and women have always hurt her, so she sucks dicks in the back of taxi cabs and fingers women in the bathrooms of clubs she should have long since been kicked out of, and wonders if this is a viable purpose in life, because she's getting pretty fucking good at fucking and leaving.

And then someone leaves a ten-dollar bill on the dresser and she realises that maybe if that is all her humanity is worth, then it is not worth the pain she goes through to shower off the remains of her encounters until she can see the translucency of her skin through the guilt. She burns the bill even though she needs it. It's a symbol of something,, although she hasn't quite figured that one out yet,, and she watches it float from her balcony into the yellow tulips below and curses at the way the damp soil puts out the flames, because that means someone has watered them and that means someone cares.

_ So they pull back, make other plans _

_ I understand, I'm a liability _

_ Get you wild, make you leave _

She gets a little high and paints a picture of her own eyes. They look hollow and it scares her because even if this isn't real - that's what she thinks of herself, of her eyes. 

She buys a bottle of white wine and drinks it while sitting alone on the floor of the shower, singing 'Heart to Break' at the top of her lungs, until the neighbours bang on the wall and she is forced to apologise and mentally file the exchange under 'healing'.

She chain-smokes on the fire escape for five hours while reciting the script for ‘Clueless’ until her fingers turn blue, because it feels like a non-destructive use of her freedom and she can't afford therapy.

She watches “Blue Planet” on her old laptop while eating Chinese food from a week ago, and she cries into the cold chow mein because she'd forgotten the world can be beautiful.

She starts volunteering at an animal shelter to alleviate her boredom, but has to quit when her favourite puppy gets adopted and she can't handle the fact that he's gone.

She writes a list of things she can be grateful for, and then writes a list of things she hates and crumples them up - throwing them like paper darts into an empty takeout container.

She does March madness with household items and the kitchen roll wins, purely because it's so multipurpose that the salt and pepper shakers didn't stand a chance.

She spends the day catching up on all of the twitter fights she has missed, and by sundown she realises that she still doesn't understand them.

She tries to make a box cake. She gets food poisoning.

She tries to pretend that she does not feel a little bit broken all of the time. She does not succeed.

_ I'm a little much for _

_ E-a-na-na-na, everyone _

She gets bored of her sadness after a while - finds it intrusive. It's funny, she thinks, how sometimes you can become aware of your own misfortune and yet do nothing of consequence to try and change it.

She takes the pity party down to her favourite little coffee shop - shelves among shelves of stories that you can get lost in - filled with old romance novels and classic literature. 

She buys a coffee with the pocket change she has and manages to score an almond croissant too, the smell's mixing together to send her into a state of relaxation before either touches her lips. She starts her morning with a copy of 'The Colour Purple' in a corner of the shop characterised by comfy chairs and vintage reading lamps. It reminds her of a library, and it makes her nostalgic for her smalltown library with its seemingly endless book collection and a delightful old woman on the front desk. The smell of petunias gets caught in her nostrils. 

By the dregs of her coffee, she finds herself wanting to cry a little bit more than she did when she woke up, so she returns the book and moves towards the natural light. There is a spare table by the window so she snags it and pulls along a battered copy of 'Romeo and Juliet', too - feeling too much like a tragic heroine to care when an old woman gives her a dirty look for the noise of the chair. She reads until her eyes are sore, but then she looks up.

The cafe is on 23rd street, hidden under a tattoo shop and the rain paints the window with an almost hypnotising sheen. The people outside look so vibrant in their yellow raincoats and blue umbrellas, and for the first time in months Jan feels the urge to go outside and feel the rain on her skin.

She doesn't - her immune system would get the last word and she doesn't feel the need to spend the next week with a runny nose and a cough that will never recover from just a bowl of soup, but she watches the kids frolic in the puddles and she lets out a sigh she didn't know she was holding.

She sees a blonde little girl look hesitantly at a long puddle. She's dressed in a powder pink anorak and little black wellies with jeans tucked in, and her hair is neatly braided, but falling out of her hood, and she wonders briefly if that is what her own daughter would look like. Blonde, naive, and a little hopeful. The girl kicks it tentatively, watches the water spray with a giggle, and even though the street is crowded, she manages to look free and happy. She is so close to the window that when she turns around, she places both hands on it and peers in. She's in line with Jan, and the woman cradles her long-cold coffee cup with an open smile and waves at the girl who waves back with a crinkled nose and a toothy grin. She is tugged away by her mother who scolds the little girl for getting her jeans wet, but Jan learns that her name was Faith and she feels comforted by something. She's not sure what yet, but it's something.

_ The truth is I am a toy that people enjoy _

_ 'Til all of the tricks don't work anymore _

_ And then they are bored of me _

There are days when she doesn’t recognise who she’s become. 

She can't seem to reconcile her name with the girl that stands in front of her. She's all harsh angles and ghostly skin that feels so thin in places you could cut through with a butter knife and a little hope. She doesn't have hope to spare.

She is a library of scars. You can open her up and read her story like a book, leaf through her ribs for the page on the cigarette burn on her left hip. You'll find the story of her needle marked inner-elbow in the hollow pocket of her collarbone - how she passed out playing football and got an IV full of fluids, but they couldn't find a vein. How she'd still won the match. How her team picked her up over their heads, and it's the last time she remembers carefree happiness tasting like candy floss and spun sugar.

If you look into her eyes, you might find her secrets, but the idea scares her. She's always been an open book and she still is, but the difference between an open book and a book you should read is that some will hold secrets not fit for human consumption, and Jan is the picture of not fit for human consumption.

The pads of her fingers are dry and cracked as she lifts the grease at the roots of her hair - it clings to her scalp, flat and oily. The bleach damaged ends are frayed and split halfway up, and she realises hair to your ass is only attractive when it is kept and cared for. Nothing about her is kept or cared for. 

She stands under the hot stream of the shower until her sins have washed down the drain. She prunes back the nettles that litter her navel... for the first time in months - chooses to live. 

Her hair comes out in thin strands as she massages coconut shampoo into her roots, feels blood pump through her scalp. Once she is clean and dry she takes a pair of kitchen scissors to her hair and cuts it in half. Where the once dark roots have grown down to her bosom she chops a line with her unsteady hands, feathering the bottom like she remembers seeing someone do, months ago. 

She finds a thick moisturiser at the bottom of her bathroom cabinet and takes the last disposable razor out of the packet. Shaving her legs has always made her feel like a woman. The smooth skin under her fingers. Neither her fingers nor her legs are soft or smooth, but she slathers the moisturiser on, feeling childlike regret when she goes to put a clean pair of joggers on and finds them sticking to her skin.

It's eleven p.m., but she cleans her apartment - properly cleans it - and when she finishes just after three, she feels new. 

Gone is the cigarette smoke embedded in the walls, the smell of Kahlua that seeps out of the floorboards every once in a while. If she breathes deeply - which is a struggle for her fragile lungs - she can almost smell Summer. 

She drops her final full packet of cigarettes through the grating into the yellow tulips and when she goes out again in daylight - they're gone.

_ I know that it's exciting _

_ Running through the night, but _

_ Every perfect summer's _

_ Eating me alive until you're gone _

_ Better on my own _

Jackie comes along when she is needed most and she refuses to leave. 

She is the first page of Jan's new book - the beginning of all things bright. She does not fix her, but she lets her grow, and that's all she could really ask for.

She is the owner of the yellow tulips - the purveyor or sunshine and cheer, and the keeper of Jan's final promise to herself. They keep the cigarettes in the cupboard under the sink with the other chemicals not fit for human consumption, but Jan is no longer one of them.

Jackie holds her like she matters. Her fingers fit between the juts of her ribs and she holds the full weight of Jan's heart with an easy smile. She kisses down the fullness of her thighs - watermelon chapstick on tan skin - reads the novels hidden in her eyes like they are magazines, digestible, easy, even though Jan knows the true heaviness of everything they keep. 

She is impossible to hate and so very easy to love, and Jan's heart falls long before her brain. Every ounce of compassion she has is squeezed into every action she takes until the smell of fresh ginger cookies fills every inch of her apartment. She feels like home even on the days that Jan doesn't know what home really feels like, and she smells like fabric softener.

She is all of this, but she is not stupid, or vapid. She has no hero complex - knows she cannot save anyone from themselves even if they so want her to. She knows how to dance on the hot coals of a road you shouldn't walk, and she knows what is learnt from it. How to be strong, how to breathe in a lungful of smoke, and still exhale smooth and calm.

She helps Jan paint her bedroom a dusty pink - the colour of the blush that naturally spatters her cheeks whenever the brunette's fingers slip into hers. She helps Jan bleach her hair again - returns it to the blonde she feels best with. 

Jackie teaches her to knit and to read French poetry and to tie a good bow and to hem jeans and to live life without fear. 

How to live.

Jan learns how easy it is to be kind, nice, to spread compassion and love through your words and your soul and your songs. She writes acoustic love ballads and plays at open mic nights that only serve mocktails wearing her embroidered jeans at bars where the playlists are named after moods.

She does Yoga in front of her bedroom mirror. Falls in love with the shape of her body over and over again, even on the days when it hurts. 

_ They say, "You're a little much for me _

_ You're a liability _

_ You're a little much for me" _

Jan takes Jackie to that café and they sit in the window for hours. Jackie buys them both hot teas and almond croissants, and they read Shakespeare to each other under the warm overhead lighting - protected from the harsh realities of New York City where it is raining again.

Jan retells the story of the little girl with the blonde plaits between the prose of ‘Hamlet’ and ‘The Taming of The Shrew’, and Jackie watches her with a patient smile - taking in the joy on her girlfriend's face. She tells her that she'd be a wonderful mother when they're hand in hand on the way home - hoods up against the pouring rain. Jan smiles softly, but reminds her that she is still only twenty-two. She has no college diploma and no job prospects and Jackie reminds her that that is okay. 

Jackie points out that she has had life experiences no one should have let her have with a matter of fact manner, and Jan relents, because Jackie is the first healthy relationship she has had and she still isn't sure how to argue without ruining the balance. 

Jackie is twenty-seven and a seamstress for Broadway, and she makes Jan realise that she wants a purpose in life that isn't just to survive, because even that gets boring after a while. So Jackie helps her through an accelerated English diploma. and then she sits proudly at the kitchen table and watches as she gets a grant from a non-profit to study an accelerated bachelors in education. 

They watch the yellow poppies bloom in the window box for several years, before Jan comes home in a cap and a gown at the age of twenty-seven, a licenced elementary school teacher in the state of New York, and they hang her degree on the wall next to her five-years-sober chip and they make enchiladas to celebrate. 

They eat them on the fire escape with their legs swinging in the early summer breeze and watch as their upstairs neighbour sits on the window ledge and plays the ukulele to the noisy city. 

She sings softly and Jan can't help but join in under her breath, Jackie resting her head on the blonde's shoulder as she is serenaded with ‘La Vie En Rose’. 

The stranger giggles at the end, before they hear the window shut again, and it brings Jan serenity to know her old apartment is inhabited by new life.

Jackie asks her if she wants to marry her underneath the falling cherry blossoms in their local park. Jan answers yes before the brunette can finish asking and a little girl tells them they are pretty as they leave.

Jan tucks a blossom behind her ear and tells her she's pretty too, and not to ever forget it.

_ So they pull back, make other plans _

_ I understand, I'm a liability _

_ Get you wild, make you leave _

They adopt a little blonde girl the day after Jan's twenty-ninth birthday. She's got eyes like the ocean and cheeks that would make a cherub jealous, and she hasn't had a good start in life but they want to give her one.

She's only two, but she has so much hope in her eyes that sometimes it brings Jan to tears, although that might just be the sleep deprivation. 

Jackie teaches her Farsi, while Jan just tries to teach her love, and together they raise a bright young girl. 

She falls in love for the first time when she is fifteen and he's a lovely, sweet boy called Jonathon and he does everything right. He buys her a bouquet of crocuses and holds her hand in the dark and comes to family dinners, even the ones where Jan is trying to mark the spellings of seven-year-olds over a steaming plate of risotto and Jackie has to take her glasses, because they're so fogged up they're inhibiting her reading. 

They teach her that it's okay to feel sad, and broken, and a little bit lonely, as long as you know you are never alone. That they will always have a spare pair of rain boots and a bar of chocolate, because the chocolate is for the heartbreak, and the rain will wash everything away, if you let it.

Jonathon lasts until they are seventeen, and when he goes, he goes kindly. And they take her out for ice cream and buy her a new dress and lay on the grass in Central Park, just watching the clouds move overhead.

Jan holds her while she cries, and Jackie makes a souffle because her Iranian mother told her nothing couldn't be fixed with a good souffle and that's never left her. 

Jan makes sure that she learns not to keep her nose up in the air. Because she is only smelling to try and find the smoke that will lead her back to the boy who lost everything in the fire, so she can try and rescue him - or the boy who lit it, so she can save him. She teaches her that she cannot save people, but that does not mean kindness is unwarranted.

And most importantly of all. They tell her about the unwavering innocence of the girl with the little blonde pigtails outside the window and what led Jan there in the first place. They tell her it is okay to make mistakes and that you can always fix them, even if it seems hard, even if it doesn't seem worth it. They teach her that life is always worth it, so long as you can take a deep breath in and exhale a deep breath out, and that when neither seems possible - you should just close your eyes and picture the ocean, because there is nothing quite like the way the waves chase the shoreline. 

They tell her everything they know - their little Faith.

_ I'm a little much for _

_ E-a-na-na-na, everyone _

  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Flower Dictionary!
> 
> Marigold - Pain And Regret  
> Wormwood - Absence, Bitter Sorrow  
> Cypress - Despair, Sorrow  
> Yellow Roses - A Broken Heart  
> Rainflower - I Must Atone For My Sins  
> Black Dahlia - Betrayal And Dishonesty  
> Fungus - Resilience.  
> Yellow Tulips - Cheerful Thoughts And Sunshine  
> Bluebell - Gratitude  
> Buttercup - A Want To Make Someone's Day Happier, New Beginnings  
> Petunia - The Desire To Spend Time Somewhere Because You Find It Soothing.  
> Germanium - Determination  
> Yellow Poppies - Success  
> Crocus - Youthful Joy, Love
> 
> if you cried - i want to know <3


End file.
